I won't give any specific tips (a lot of good ones have already been shared), but I'll tell you how my two brothers and I did it.
My older brother started coding in high school. He was really good at it and picked up a few gigs before he went away to college. Later on, he got a job as a QA Engineer (if there was ever a job more in demand and less in supply than software development...) and after a year or two writing Selenium test suites, his company gave him a spot on the programming team.
I also coded a bit in high school -- I wrote programs in BASIC on my TI calculator to make my calculus homework go faster, and messed around a little with Visual Basic, Dark Basic, Python, C++ and a couple others -- but I wasn't nearly as prodigious as my brother at that point. In college I got a job doing technical support on campus, with no qualifications other than "I'm good with computers." Student jobs tend to have lower barriers to entry. There was a lot of downtime at that job (there was a period of, like, two months where nobody was opening strange email attachments; it was great). My coworkers watched Netflix and surfed the web during downtime, but I decided to spend that time learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I bought a domain name and built my personal website.
After that year I took two years off to serve as a Mormon missionary, and when I came back, the software boom was in full swing. I couldn't pass any coding interviews, but with my tech skills and the courses I'd taken toward an English degree, I got a job as a technical writer for the university's online education department. I shared a cubicle with some of the QA engineers, saw a lot of the work they did, and realized I'd be good at it. I offered my help to their team lead, who was surprised but offered me a couple of tasks to see if I could figure them out. (I could.) Whenever I had time to spare from my regular work, I would help out the QA team, and eventually I changed my job title to "Technical Writer / QA Engineer". Not much later, I changed jobs to another department, doing QA engineering for a higher rate per-hour. I worked hard there (in the words of my supervisor: "The first QA that's written any useful tests") and before long they offered me a spot on one of their web development teams. And a few months later they moved me to the architecture team.
A few months before I graduated, my brother referred me to a startup, who offered me a part-time position, transitioning to full-time after graduation, at almost double what I was earning. I said yes and I've been with them ever since. So much for my English degree.
My little brother has always been good with computers, but never did any coding. University wasn't for him and he was struggling to decide where to take his career. My older brother and I encouraged him to try programming; for some reason we thought he might have a genetic predisposition for it 😉. So he signed up for a local code bootcamp. He just graduated from it a month or so ago, and he already has a paid internship lined up with an awesome company...as a QA engineer. And there's a good chance they'll take him full-time once the internship is over.
I guess the three of us have walked a very similar path.
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I won't give any specific tips (a lot of good ones have already been shared), but I'll tell you how my two brothers and I did it.
My older brother started coding in high school. He was really good at it and picked up a few gigs before he went away to college. Later on, he got a job as a QA Engineer (if there was ever a job more in demand and less in supply than software development...) and after a year or two writing Selenium test suites, his company gave him a spot on the programming team.
I also coded a bit in high school -- I wrote programs in BASIC on my TI calculator to make my calculus homework go faster, and messed around a little with Visual Basic, Dark Basic, Python, C++ and a couple others -- but I wasn't nearly as prodigious as my brother at that point. In college I got a job doing technical support on campus, with no qualifications other than "I'm good with computers." Student jobs tend to have lower barriers to entry. There was a lot of downtime at that job (there was a period of, like, two months where nobody was opening strange email attachments; it was great). My coworkers watched Netflix and surfed the web during downtime, but I decided to spend that time learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I bought a domain name and built my personal website.
After that year I took two years off to serve as a Mormon missionary, and when I came back, the software boom was in full swing. I couldn't pass any coding interviews, but with my tech skills and the courses I'd taken toward an English degree, I got a job as a technical writer for the university's online education department. I shared a cubicle with some of the QA engineers, saw a lot of the work they did, and realized I'd be good at it. I offered my help to their team lead, who was surprised but offered me a couple of tasks to see if I could figure them out. (I could.) Whenever I had time to spare from my regular work, I would help out the QA team, and eventually I changed my job title to "Technical Writer / QA Engineer". Not much later, I changed jobs to another department, doing QA engineering for a higher rate per-hour. I worked hard there (in the words of my supervisor: "The first QA that's written any useful tests") and before long they offered me a spot on one of their web development teams. And a few months later they moved me to the architecture team.
A few months before I graduated, my brother referred me to a startup, who offered me a part-time position, transitioning to full-time after graduation, at almost double what I was earning. I said yes and I've been with them ever since. So much for my English degree.
My little brother has always been good with computers, but never did any coding. University wasn't for him and he was struggling to decide where to take his career. My older brother and I encouraged him to try programming; for some reason we thought he might have a genetic predisposition for it 😉. So he signed up for a local code bootcamp. He just graduated from it a month or so ago, and he already has a paid internship lined up with an awesome company...as a QA engineer. And there's a good chance they'll take him full-time once the internship is over.
I guess the three of us have walked a very similar path.